'Bringing Materiality Back In': Measuring the strength of bonds and stocks as ties in interfirm networks

Research into financial institutions and their organizational ties continues to draw attention from scholars across business and organization studies. However, there is a gap in the extant research in measuring the strength of the interdependent material interest of interfirm networks. This paper proposes a framework to measure that material strength of ties in organizational networks and models the social networks of decision-makers as an overlay to corporate interlocks, integrating network concepts and financial data analysis. Based on holdings and ownership data collected in 2019, the paper illustrates this by utilizing co-investor networks with 148 nodes connected in the 40 stocks of the German DAX index and 232 nodes through common ties in 35 stocks constituting the Spanish IBEX index and to measure the strength of ties. The paper offers a method to study both micro and macro phenomena in corporate interlocks and develops three areas of possible hypothesis development relevant to international business studies: 1) Organizational and industry value chains, 2) mimetic network behavior, 3) home bias and capital market liability of foreignness.